Marlford (8 page)

‘Yeah, well… thanks, but I think I'll give Machiavelli a miss, man.' Dan smiled tightly. ‘It's a bit – out of date.'

Oscar reeled at the slight. ‘I think you're mistaken. I consider it timeless. I find it unerringly apposite – I refer to it without hesitation.' His eyes settled on Ellie for a moment, narrowing, as if he was making a calculation.

When he spoke again, his voice had lost its enthusiasm. ‘May I ask who it is, then, that you read? Perhaps John Stuart Mill?'

‘You want to know?' Dan sniffed while he considered his answer. ‘Well then, Marx. And Guy Debord – and Lukács, of course.' He uttered the names carelessly. ‘They're modern, you know. Modern thinkers, man. Have you heard of them?'

Oscar did not answer. He had found a loose thread
on his sleeve and pulled it out between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it hard before pulling it sharply to sever it from the tweed.

When the emergency tailoring was complete, he spoke abruptly. ‘I'm not sure this is quite your thing, Ellie. I think perhaps I should deal with this request myself.'

‘I don't think we can help him at all, can we, Mr Quersley?' she replied. ‘I've never seen any of those names in the catalogues. I would remember.'

He glared at her, a warning. ‘Perhaps if you could continue your research with these two little boys. They seem to have finished with the volume on automobiles.'

The children were comparing the length of their middle fingers by measuring them with a wooden ruler, the books pushed to one side of them.

Dan gestured loosely at the packed shelves. ‘I take it you haven't got anything, then? No Debord hidden away amongst the knitting patterns or Mrs Beeton, or whatever it is.'

Ellie collected the books from the boys' table. ‘It's a very good library,' she said, firmly.

‘Yeah, man, I suppose. If you need to read up on etiquette – or the rules of billiards.' He snorted a quick laugh but did not quite meet her eyes. ‘Looks like the place is falling down, anyway. Perhaps that's for the best.'

Ellie was stiff. ‘If you need me, Mr Quersley, I'll be with the boys.'

‘Yes, yes. That's quite right.' Oscar offered her a slight bow and then moved thoughtfully towards Dan, addressing him in a strained undertone, anxious that Ellie should not hear him. ‘Young man… the names you mentioned
– there's nothing quite like that in the collection, I admit, although as regards historical material—'

‘The world moves on, man.'

‘Well, yes, indeed – quite so. And the philosophy of political economy is one that interests me a great deal. Perhaps if we were to talk—' He felt the buzz of possibility in his head.

‘No, I don't think so. If there's nothing to read, I'd probably rather help Ellie with her work.' Dan shrugged. ‘Thanks, man.'

‘Miss Barton does not work.' Oscar was suddenly too loud. Everyone looked at him, surprised; even the two boys glanced at him fearfully, in case they were in trouble.

‘No?' Dan was confused. He frowned at Ellie. ‘I thought you said—'

She tried to explain. ‘No – I meant… you see, the Bartons – I'm a Barton…' But it all seemed too embarrassing suddenly, too complicated. ‘Well, it's a hobby, I suppose. A kind of a hobby.' She placed the books down very carefully on the table, brushed the front of her skirt and felt each of the pins in her hair. They watched, her distress mesmerizing.

‘Here – miss?' One of the boys leaned towards her kindly, holding out a page torn from his notebook. ‘We've drawn you a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon. Look, you see? In his spacesuit and everything. You can have it if you like.'

She took the gift and stared at the bulbous figure, crudely done, smudged, but somehow astounding.

‘I listened,' Dan said. ‘Well, sort of. It crackled on and off, so I didn't get much – it was only on the radio at the
squa—' He stopped himself just in time, glancing quickly at Ellie. ‘Yeah, well, it was a shame, man, with the radio, but even the bits I caught… it was amazing.'

Ellie's interruption snapped between them. ‘Do you know what this is, Mr Quersley?' She held the drawing towards him.

‘It's Neil Armstrong.' Dan winked at the boys.

She ignored him. ‘I can't make head or tail of it.'

Dan stared at her. ‘Don't you know?' He paused, looked hard at her. ‘Man, you really don't know, do you?'

She stiffened. ‘No,' she said. ‘I really don't know. There are many things I do know, but this is not one of them.'

‘But that's the moon landing. Neil Armstrong is one of the astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission. You must have heard of it? Even here – surely you've heard of it? Don't you have a radio, even? Newspapers?'

She still held the paper out. ‘Mr Quersley?'

Oscar cleared his throat. ‘We haven't talked about it, Ellie.' He took the drawing from her at last and glanced at it. ‘It's very good, boys, very good.'

‘But I don't understand.'

Dan's eyes were wide open. ‘My God – you really haven't heard—'

‘This is… something has happened? This man, this Mr Armstrong, has landed on the moon?' She tried to piece it together, but Ellie had nothing more than the boys' drawing and the bizarre expression worn by Oscar Quersley. ‘Is that right?'

She looked at Oscar, unbelieving. He nodded.

‘Surely you must have—?' Dan began again, but she cut him off, her anger crisp, translucent.

‘A man has walked on the moon. And you've kept this from me? Something of this – magnitude?'

The boys were giggling.

‘No, no, Ellie – no.' Oscar shook his head, a series of quick apologies. ‘I haven't kept it from you. You misunderstand – I've done nothing on purpose. It's simply that we haven't discussed it. Remiss, on my part, perhaps, but not purposefully obstructive. I just didn't consider that it might be – important.'

‘Important?'

‘Relevant, then. Not relevant. There didn't seem the right moment, when it would have been relevant.'

She snatched the drawing back from him. ‘This is mine.' Her voice was rasping, like dried leaves on old stone. ‘I'll leave you to finish here, Mr Quersley. If you could.' She gestured towards the boys, who stifled their giggles and cowered, afraid that Ellie might come at them and shake them in her anger, but she simply walked out, crossing the street and disappearing from view as a lorry passed.

‘Blimey!' Dan whistled through his teeth.

‘She can sometimes be imperious,' Oscar said. ‘It's her breeding. It comes naturally.'

‘No, not that, man – I mean, not knowing about the moon landings. Not even knowing that.'

Oscar did not quite answer. ‘I've known Miss Barton all her life. I have a great respect for her, a great admiration,' he said, instead.

Dan shook his head. ‘Well – that's like… that's evidence, isn't it, man? Right there – of just how isolated these kinds of people are. How obsolete.' He pressed his
spectacles against his nose and pushed the curl of his hair behind his ears. He looked out after her, following the line she had taken down Victoria Street.

Oscar noticed the stiffness of his stance, his anxious lean forwards as though, perhaps, he wanted to go after Ellie, or haul her back. He busied himself by helping the boys to pack away their homework.

‘But, you know, even though she's such a dinosaur – there's something about her, man, isn't there?' Dan added.

Oscar accompanied the young readers to the front steps, wiped down the table and piled their books away neatly. Only then did he speak again.

‘Perhaps I should have made sure she was better informed.'

‘But it's not your job, man. It's what I said – it's the decadent elite. You can't be held responsible for all that.'

Oscar finished tidying laboriously, as though Dan was not there, then he took up his position behind the desk, standing very straight, with his hands on the open day-book of loans.

‘She probably should have known about it,' he admitted, quietly. ‘I could have told her.' He slid his palms over the ledger, pressing into its solidity, and then, with a sudden, brisk gesture, he said, ‘But, young man, allow me to tell you about the Braithwaite Barton Memorial Library…'

Nine

G
adiel sat in the sun on the stone rim of the fountain. A breeze skimmed across the flat land and the flashes of waste brine by the chemical works, squeezing up the terraced streets and blowing spray now and again onto his skin. The hours that crept so slowly at the squat, demanding and accusative, lay more gently here. Cars came occasionally, circling the nymph; women walked up from the cottages and headed towards the centre of the village; a tractor started up on the playing fields behind, making growling passes up and down the cricket pitch. This slight activity added to the sense that nothing was happening.

He did not want to think of Ellie again, or the unsettling intimacy of the odd arrangements at the manor, so, while he smoked, Gadiel tinkered with perspective, trying to hook smoke rings over the top of the works' chimney. The task was more difficult than it looked: when he blew out a ring, he found that the chimney was not quite where he had expected it to be after all. Getting to his feet, he hauled himself up onto a higher ledge and perched alongside the
water nymph, wrapping his arms across her bare shoulders, steadying himself by gripping the loose folds of her stone gown in his fist. She pushed her tipping urn against his chest, as though he might help her with the weight. He dangled one leg over the trickle of water and puckered hard, leaning, so that he could puff his smoke ring high and true. Still it squirted away.

He shuffled around the fountain, the reflections from the tiles slapping blue squares onto his skin. Facing Braithwaite Barton, looking towards the pull and plunge of the roofs at the centre of the village – the confident strata of brickwork thrown into confusion by the sag of the land – he saw Ellie, coming quickly towards him.

Gadiel started. He pulled away from the nymph, breaking the steady trickle of water as he jumped down, brushing his hands over his clothes and flicking away his cigarette; it fell into the shallow basin with a hiss. He started across the cobbles that flared from the fountain, his legs oddly unstable.

She was wearing an odd kind of shawl: a poncho knitted in two shades of faded pink, fringed with knotted wool in a selection of pastel colours. It hung limply over her shoulders, longer at the back than at the front. She had not seen him yet.

He took a long breath and stepped forwards. ‘Hello, Ellie.'

She looked at him, her eyes wide. ‘I had no idea – that there'd been a man on the moon.'

He was going to laugh, but then he recognized the same expression that he had seen on her face when they were in the billiard room – anguish only barely concealed,
closer to the surface now, about to break through. He was worried that she might crumple there in front of him.

‘Look – why don't we have a walk?' he offered. ‘I've been hanging around here for ages. I could do with stretching my legs.'

‘No, no. I have to go.' She went to pull away. He knew that she hardly saw him.

‘Look, Ellie. I don't know what the matter is, but I'll help. Whatever it is – honestly, I'll help you.'

He brushed his hand playfully against the fringe of the poncho, and Ellie watched the tassels dance between them.

All he saw was the way she looked down.

‘Ellie, really – I didn't mean to say anything wrong. Don't be angry.'

‘Oh, no – no, it's just – I don't know what's happening. At the library, they told me about a man called Neil Armstrong. Some little boys told me – young boys, hardly more than ten years old.' But it was Oscar Quersley's crumpled expression she remembered, and Dan's astonishment. ‘I don't know anything about it.'

Gadiel only partly understood. ‘Is that all it is? But, look, there's stuff about it everywhere. If we go to the newsagents we can probably pick up one of those special editions. They'll have all the facts in there – if there're things you want to know.'

‘I want to know all of it.'

He laughed. ‘Come on, then.'

But her eyes were hard and dark. ‘That's what you meant, when we were talking in the woods – when you were talking about listening on the radio. I didn't understand.'

‘I thought you were a bit vague.' He tried to preserve
his smile in the face of her anger. ‘That's why I went out to look at the moon, you see – I mean, I didn't expect to see space rockets or anything, but you know…' His voice trailed away.

‘I didn't understand,' she said again. ‘I had no idea what you were talking about.' She looked at him, pleadingly. ‘Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me about Neil Armstrong?'

‘I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.' But he saw that he had let her down. ‘Look, Ellie, let's go and buy some papers or something. You can read about it – everything about it.'

He offered her a hand, but she swept by him, her poncho tassles swaying as she went on ahead.

‘It'll be too late, though, won't it?'

Gadiel waited under the striped awning outside the newsagents, leaning back against the wall, one foot propped against the brickwork. He watched the customers across the street at the sunken fishmonger's: only the top section of the shop door was visible, the rest of it was buried beneath the pavement. Alongside, the wide window, too, was mostly hidden below street level; what remained was jammed open with a cut-off broom handle, creating a narrow aperture through which the fishmonger passed out a paper packet. His head barely reached the knees of his customer, who stooped low to take his fish and pay.

Gadiel only slowly took in what he was seeing – the unlikely angles of the skewed window and door, a child's drawing of a shop front – and, before long, he was distracted by the far-off chime of an ice-cream van.

By the time Ellie emerged from the shop, he was bouncing impatiently from foot to foot, blushing violently with the prospect of pleasing her. ‘Do you want an ice cream?' He beamed at the magnificence of the proposal.

Ellie gripped her magazines hard to her chest, as though he might threaten to steal them from her. ‘An ice cream?'

‘Yeah, from the van. It's not here yet, not quite, but I can hear it. Can't you hear it?' The tune was coming louder, the notes more shrill. ‘We'll go up to the top of town. Meet it up there.'

‘Wait – Gadiel – I can't…'

‘It'll only take a minute. Come on, have a treat. Have a treat on me. I can hear it getting closer.'

They pushed back up towards Braithwaite Barton just as the van trundled into view from the edge of the salt pits, orange and crimson trumpets on its roof spewing an elongated nursery rhyme.

As Gadiel set off towards it, waving, Ellie gave in to the sense that the day was beyond her, distorted and strange. The chimes played one more loop then stopped, making everything oddly hushed.

She sat on the bench at her grandfather's feet, placing her magazines neatly beside her. Gadiel brought two ice creams, the thick, bright red sauce dripping onto the pavement leaving a trail that might have been blood – his hands were already scarlet.

He held one of the cornets out to her and settled against the wide base of the statue, licking the gloop from his fingers.

Ellie held the treat at arm's length and studied it. But
she was too slow: her scoop of soft ice cream, inadequately sculpted, slunk from its cornet and landed with a soft
splat
on the pavement.

She could not bring herself to look at the mess, grubby pink, already watery. It felt like a desecration.

‘Never mind – share mine.' Gadiel held his cone towards her.

She shook her head. ‘Thank you. There's no need.' Her voice was grainy, threatening tears, but haughty, nonetheless. She rose from the bench and stepped away from her grandfather's protection, turning her back so that all she could see were neat flowerbeds, inscribing perfect parallels either side of a raked gravel path.

The sun was in Gadiel's eyes. He squinted at her while he licked ridges in the dome of his ice cream. He thought there was something new in her bearing but perhaps it was just a trick of the light, the smudge of rough shadows.

He watched a while longer. She was still, half-turned from him, her chin lifted to the sky. He saw how much she looked like the statue above them.

‘All done then?' He felt he ought to speak, otherwise his quiet scrutiny was too much of an intrusion. ‘Shall we head back?'

‘Yes, thank you. Thank you for waiting.' She glanced at the magazines on the bench and said then, with desperate intensity, childlike: ‘I want to go home.'

She led him from the gardens. They skirted the repair works in the street and walked briskly down the slope. Ellie did not glance at the library. She continued purposefully beyond the nymph and up an alleyway by the almshouses, quickening her pace as she drew near the kissing gate.

Gadiel offered his arm. She took it without looking at him but also without hesitation; he drew her close. She gripped the magazines in her free hand with new determination.

She tried to picture them walking together. She auditioned a variety of scenarios, flicking through them like picture postcards stacked in a tray, but none of the images would hold steady; they would not quite come clear: her imagination failed her. She was thrown back to their unremarkable tread, the broken surface of the old driveway, the unkempt limes, the soft green light webbing around her, the strength of his arm beneath her hand, and something she could not determine, a thrill of some kind, an ache.

They were in sight of the manor. It had never looked so beautiful, the façade shadowed, the windows dark, the domes imposing in the slanting sunlight. The brick tower had somehow sloughed off its utilitarian ugliness; it seemed solid and reassuring, its plainness confident. The scattered weeds of the gravel drive, the sinking roof of the portico, the shabby flowerbeds: all this seemed as it should.

Ellie saw the men sitting together on one of the stone benches on the terrace. They had a long, wide view from there, the whole of Marlford laid out before them. They would have seen her approach with Gadiel, she knew that.

Then she heard the stable clock strike, a long succession of unsteady notes. She broke from Gadiel's arm and hurried on more quickly, alone. ‘I need to read this,' she called over her shoulder, gesturing towards him with the magazines.

He caught up with her. They had not finished; there was so much more to say. ‘But, Ellie, we were having a good time.'

‘Yes – exactly – you made me forget.'

‘Forget what?'

She glanced towards the men, but from this distance she could only guess at their expressions.

‘About Neil Armstrong. About the boys. About everything.'

Gadiel was halted by the ferocity of her accusation. He stood still.

She pushed on more quickly, the green and yellow sense of summer, the swirl of heat and colour adding to her muddle, everything unexplained, nameless and formless.

After a moment, Gadiel began to follow her, wary. ‘Ellie, don't run off. Just stay and talk for a moment.' Before she could reply, he had slipped his arm under the drape of her poncho, the pink wool flowing over him like molten marshmallow. ‘There's nothing to worry about, I promise you,' he said, simply. ‘We'll sort out everything. Even the man on the moon.'

She gasped at the feel of his hand around her waist; she had no idea what to make of it. She was so intent on its weight, its warmth against her, that she could not keep hold of her bucking thoughts.

‘No – please. You should go back to the village now. Please – go. Go away.'

She glanced again at the men, and pushed at him. They were both surprised by the force of it.